Alistair Durie’s hands move deliberately, grinding small measures of dark beans into squat whiskey glasses and arranging them in a neat circle. He is preparing a cupping, or comparative coffee tasting, lining up Kenyan, Ethiopian, Indonesian and Columbian varieties. Each glass is topped with boiling water and left to steep.

Durie, who owns the Elysian Room in Kitsilano, hands me a clipboard and we move around the table noisily slurping spoonfuls of each variety (to spray our palates and enhance tasting), scratching flavour notes: raspberry, walnut, bergamot, lemon oil, bark, manure, hard-boiled eggs. Each cup is revisited 10 times or more, until the small samples grow cold. “Cupping is a bit like hypnosis,” he tells me. “There’s an intense focus. You’re accessing your taste memory, really reaching back into your brain and making connections.” He singles out the Ethiopian Yirgacheffe. “This is the supermodel of the bunch,” he declares. It’s brightly citric and mouthwatering, reminding me of lemon-balm candies and iced tea. “And Froot Loops,” Alistair adds.

If you haven’t noticed yet, this isn’t your parents’ cuppa joe. Durie is one of a growing crowd of zealous coffee professionals who are exploring the cutting edge of everything the bean has to offer. They are roasters, graders and baristas who are driven to near-obsession to source and prepare the world’s best coffees. In North America, the movement’s heart is in the Pacific Northwest. In coffee circles, it’s called the Third Wave.

The first wave was coffee as commodity, utilitarian. I remember, as a kid, the red vacuum-packed tin my mother would remove from the freezer, painted with an exotic turbaned man in a yellow robe. The can would hiss as she opened it. Back then, coffee was something hot to wake you up in the morning (or keep you awake all night), as ubiquitous and unremarkable as tap water. The second wave, which gathered force through the 1980s, washed up the Starbucks mermaid and her siren song that wooed most everyone who heard it. Espresso and “specialty” coffees like lattes and cappuccinos (previously the domain of Italian cafés) crossed into the North American mainstream, and persuaded consumers that coffee was something to be savoured—and worth paying a premium for.

The time is right for coffee’s third ascension. Third Wavers speak with reverence about coffee’s journey, the long road it takes before it winds up in your cup and how each step in getting it there is vital to the finished product. Interest in sustainable and organic farming is on the rise, the Slow Food movement is booming and many consumers are turning their curiosity about food and drink toward their morning java—and back toward independent neighbourhood cafés, where the movement first started.

The Baristas
That culinary enthusiasm is evident in the bustling, robin-egg-blue café operated by 49th Parallel Roasters on 4th Avenue in Vancouver, where lineups often stretch the length of the shop. Vince and Mike Piccolo (previously the owners of Caffè Artigiano) source and roast coffees like the 2007 Honduran and Costa Rican Cup of Excellence winners (a best-in-country designation). In Seattle, the custom roasts of Capitol Hill’s Caffé Vita (from a vintage, locomotive-like 1930s Probat roaster) and Zoka Coffee Roaster adorn the menus of the city’s finer restaurants, and have the city’s coffee drinkers buzzing.

It’s the passionate baristas who do the Third Wave’s proselytizing, people like Vancouver natives Barrett and Colter Jones, who work at 49th Parallel. In 2006, Barrett came close to winning the title of Canadian Barista Champion, earning second place. He lost out to Colter, who took his first place title to Tokyo to compete in the World Championships last spring (finishing a respectable seventh). Both have had a great impact training young baristas in the skill and precision behind their job.

Kevin Fuller of Portland’s Albina Press tries to impress an aesthetic of craft on his baristas. Each shot must be “prepared lovingly,” he says. Alistair Durie of the Elysian Room tells me that 50 sets of hands touch your coffee before it lands in your own, and the last set—the barista’s—is the most likely place for coffee to be ruined. “Ironically,” Durie points out, “because baristas have the most advanced tools of them all, the most technology at their disposal.”

The Brewing
One such piece of high-tech gear is the $11,000 Clover, a hand-tooled coffee machine that brews coffee the Third Wave way: one cup at a time. Although built in Seattle, the first two machines deployed in-store were in Vancouver (at Caffè Artigiano and the Elysian Room). Only about 300 machines have been installed, the majority in the Pacific Northwest. Marc Lieberman of Vancouver’s Mink uses only the Clover to prepare brewed coffee. “It’s the only machine that offers a thorough, precise, scientific approach to making coffee,” he tells me. The machine takes a little under two minutes to brew a cup, time that the staff at Mink take to talk single origins, organic farming or perhaps chocolate (“the other noble bean,” Lieberman calls it) with their customers.

Third Wave efforts may be pushing the mass-market coffee business to a tipping point: Starbucks recently announced a major, “back to basics” course correction in an attempt to fend off encroachment from small, artisanal coffee shops on one side and fast-food coffee on the other. They are doing away with their current automated espresso machines and retraining their baristas to pull espresso shots manually. This past April they acquired the company behind Clover, and they plan to roll out the specialty machines in some stores soon.

The Beans
Imagine walking into your local wine shop and finding only five bottles on the shelves, labelled “American Wine,” “French Wine,” “Italian Wine,” “German Wine,” “Australian Wine.” No vineyards, vintages or grape varietals—just a country of origin. That’s the way most coffee is marketed today, says Nick Cho of Murky Coffee in Washington, D.C.

It starts at the farm, where Third Wavers are trying to break the commodity mould of coffee distribution, which values coffee no differently than soy or corn: quantity, low prices and homogeny rule. At Stumptown Coffee Roasters in Portland, the terroir of coffee is paramount. Bean varietals, site elevations, even the names of growers are shared on a menu of coffees sourced from single farms and tiny mountaintop parcels. These are the Grand Cru burgundies of the coffee world.

Matt Lounsbury, Stumptown’s director of operations, walked me through a cupping of the remarkable Panama Esmeralda Especial, a coffee produced in minute quantities which has been heaped with awards, including winning the Best in Panama title four straight years. Subtle and silky, tasting of tropical fruits and fine, dark cocoa, the Esmeralda is notable also for its price: it broke records last year to become the most expensive coffee ever sold at auction. Caffè Artigiano in Vancouver offered cups for $15 (and half-pound bags for $135), baffling Tim Horton’s devotees and delighting aficionados like Lounsbury. In his view, an extra-ordinary product deserves to fetch extraordinary prices.

Aaron De Lazzer, a self-described “coffee missionary” with Vancouver’s Ethical Bean Coffee Company, tells me that some farmers aren’t aware that their coffees can garner higher prices. De Lazzer recently became Canada’s first Q Grader licensed by the Coffee Quality Institute (and one of about 340 worldwide) after a rigorous three-day exam. He grades bean samples from around the world and rates their “cup quality”: balance, sweetness, body, acidity and fragrance. Farmers can use the certification to start selling their coffees as premium products. So far, only about 50 have received the seal; they should start to show up in local markets soon.

As Third Wavers continue to tell the story of coffee’s journey, the end result for local coffee drinkers is the best of both worlds: better brew from the big boys, as well as some of the most profound, personal coffee on the continent right in our backyard. Our morning cup has grown from dour stimulant into something that takes pride of place on the breakfast table. Right beside the Froot Loops.